Chillblast Phantom 15
Neither classy nor quiet, but if all you care aboutabou is speed and value then the Phantom 15 is the one to choosecho
SCORE
PRICE £1,666 (£1,999 inc V VAT) from chillblast.com
Let’s call this one a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Beneath the bland and anonymous grey aluminium chassis, the Phantom packs in some mighty specifications, including an eight-core, 16-thread Core i710785H processor and an Nvidia RTX 2070 Super GPU. What’s more, it crams in enough cooling to keep these processors running at full pelt. The result is a laptop that might not look like much, but that machineguns the competition when it comes to performance. If speed matters and you’re not worried about high-end professional features or certifications, you’ll struggle to find a machine that gives you so much for so relatively little.
The construction isn’t actually all aluminium. The lid is, as is most of the screen surround and the plate that makes up the edges and the keyboard surround. The base and screen bezels are made of matte dark grey plastic, but this isn’t obvious at first glance. While this means the Phantom 15 lacks the premium feel of the Razer Blade 15
( see p93) or the Acer ConceptD 7, build quality is very tight, without excess flex in the base or lid and a strong, smooth hinge.
At first, it appears that the chunky vents on the left and right edges haven’t left much room for ports, with just USB-A 3.1 Gen 2 and audio ports on the left-hand side and two USB-A 3.1 Gen 1 and a microSD card slot on the right. Look round the back, however, and you’ll find HDMI and Gigabit Ethernet ports, and a Thunderbolt 3 connector. While we’d still prefer a full-sized SD card slot to microSD – most digital stills and video cameras use the bigger cards – that’s still all the connectivity most professional users are going to need.
The keyboard is an odd one. With its wide, flat keys and shallow action it feels like a chiclet effort, yet the close spacing and tactile feedback are closer to a traditional keyboard.
Either way, we’d like to see the cursor keys made more distinct and the Delete key easier to find; otherwise we have no complaints. It’s a similar story with the touchpad. If it’s not glass it feels a lot like it, and it works well for browsing, navigating Windows and handling basic operations in Premiere Pro.
In isolation, the Chillblast’s screen is pretty good. Colours are bright and punchy, and definition is perfectly respectable for a Full HD 1080p display. Streaming video looks great, and gamers will appreciate having a screen that the onboard GPU can drive at 60fps – not something that will happen with those fancy 4K screens. We’re not quite sure where the Chillblast’s THX-branded audio comes in, as we found the sound flat and unimpressive through the built-in speakers, with no sense of a wider soundstage and a lot of congestion in the mid-range.
Colour-conscious professional users will be left frustrated by the limited gamut – just 91.6% of sRGB and
76.3% of DCI-P3 – and stack the Chillblast’s display against the OLED screens of both the Gigabyte and Razer laptops and it starts to look less impressive. Given the price of those laptops and the Chillblast’s superior specification, this isn’t a problem, but it’s something that you need to bear in mind if you’re doing critical design work.
If you’re looking for performance, though, the Chillblast makes a powerful case. From CPU-intensive 3D rendering tests to video editing, processing and games, we couldn’t find anything that this laptop couldn’t chew through at class-leading speeds. On paper, the Alienware has the superior CPU, but the Chillblast came tuned to run its eight cores harder for longer, giving it the edge in a handful of our tests.
But all this horsepower comes with two downsides. Firstly, the Chillblast is incredibly noisy, sounding like an over-stretched hairdryer when pushed at all hard. Secondly, battery life isn’t great. It survived for less than four hours in our video-rundown tests, and we suspect it wouldn’t make two with anything much more substantial.
If these points matter to you, there are longer-lasting and better-behaved laptops in this Labs. But if you’re looking for maximum speed for the minimum price, you won’t find anything to match the Chillblast Phantom 15. It’s a superpowered render and computer machine.